Yale Law Journal: Volume 122, Number 3 - December 2012

Summary

One of the world's leading law journals is available in quality ebook formats. This issue of The Yale Law Journal (the third of Volume 122, academic year 2012-2013) features new articles and essays on law and legal theory by internationally recognized scholars. Contents include:

John H. Langbein, "The Disappearance of Civil Trial in the United States"

The issue also includes extensive student research on targeted killings of international outlaws, Confrontation Clause jurisprudence as implemented in lower courts, and the implied license doctrine of copyright law as applied to news aggregators.Ebook formatting includes linked notes and an active Table of Contents (including linked Tables of Contents for individual articles and essays), as well as active URLs in notes and properly presented figures and graphics throughout.

The publisher of various formats is the Yale Law Journal, who authorized exclusively Quid Pro Books to reproduce it in ebook formats: Digitally published in quality ebook editions, for the Yale Law Journal, by Quid Pro Books. Available in major digital formats and at leading ebook retailers and booksellers.

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Cataloging for Volume 122, Number 3:

ISBN: 978-1-61027-908-6 (ePUB)

CONTENTS

ARTICLES

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CIVIL TRIAL IN THE UNITED STATES

By John H. Langbein

(122 YALE L.J. 522)

FUDGING THE NUDGE: INFORMATION DISCLOSURE AND RESTAURANT GRADING

By Daniel E. Ho

(122 YALE L.J. 574)

ESSAY

ASYMMETRIES AND INCENTIVES IN PLEA BARGAINING AND

EVIDENCE PRODUCTION

By Saul Levmore & Ariel Porat

(122 YALE L.J. 690)

NOTES

TARGETING THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY OUTLAW

By Jane W. Chong

(122 YALE L.J. 724)

CONFRONTING CRAWFORD V. WASHINGTON IN THE LOWER COURTS

By Dylan O. Keenan

(122 YALE L.J. 782)

COMMENT

COPYRIGHT PROTECTION IN AN OPT-OUT WORLD: IMPLIED LICENSE

DOCTRINE AND NEWS AGGREGATORS

By Monika Isia Jasiewicz

(122 YALE L.J. 837)

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YALE LAW SCHOOL

OFFICERS OF ADMINISTRATION

Richard Charles Levin, B.A., B.Litt., Ph.D., President of the University

ABSTRACT. Since the 1930s, the proportion of civil cases concluded at trial has declined from about 20% to below 2% in the federal courts and below 1% in state courts. This Article looks to the history of the civil trial to explain why the trial endured so long and then vanished so rapidly.

For the litigants, a civil procedure system serves two connected functions: investigating the facts and adjudicating the dispute. The better the system investigates and clarifies the facts, the more it promotes settlement and reduces the need to adjudicate. The Anglo-American common law for most of its history paid scant attention to the investigative function. This Article points to the role of the jury system in shaping the procedure and restricting the investigative function. Pleading was the only significant component of pretrial procedure, and the dominant function of pleading was to control the jury by narrowing to a single issue the question that the jury would be asked to decide. This primitive pretrial process left trial as the only occasion at which it was sometimes possible to investigate issues of fact. Over time, the jury-free equity courts developed techniques to enable litigants to obtain testimonial and documentary evidence in advance of adjudication. The fusion of law and equity in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure of 1938 brought those techniques into the merged procedure, and expanded them notably. The signature reform of the Federal Rules was to shift pretrial procedure from pleading to discovery. A new system of civil procedure emerged, centered on the discovery of documents and the sworn depositions of parties and witnesses. Related innovations, the pretrial conference and summary judgment, reinforced the substitution of discovery for trial. This new procedure system has overcome the investigation deficit that so afflicted common law procedure, enabling almost all cases to be settled or dismissed without trial. Pretrial procedure has become nontrial procedure by making trial obsolete.

A striking trend in the administration of civil justice in the United States in recent decades has been the virtual abandonment of the centuries-old institution of trial. As late as 1936, on the eve of the promulgation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a fifth of all civil cases that were filed in the federal courts were resolved at trial.¹ The rest terminated either in the pleading and motions phase for failure to state a cause of action, or were settled before trial. That one-fifth trial rate was a minority but a very substantial minority. Civil practice was still in significant measure a trial practice.²

By 1940, the proportion of cases tried declined to 15.2%.³ In 1952, the figure was 12%; in 1972, 9.1%; in 1982, 6.1%; in 1992, 3.5%. By the year 2002, only 1.8% of federal civil filings terminated in trials of any sort, and only 1.2% in jury trials.⁴ At the state level, where most civil litigation takes place,⁵ trials as a percentage of dispositions declined by half between 1992 and 2005 in the nation’s seventy-five most populous counties.⁶ Jury trials in 2002 constituted less than one percent (0.6%) of all state court dispositions.⁷ Thus, in American civil justice, we have gone from a world in which trials, typically jury trials, were routine, to a world in which trials have become vanishingly rare.⁸ This Article explores how and why this movement away from trial occurred.

In functional terms, from the perspective of the litigants, a civil procedure system serves two connected objectives: investigating the facts of the case and adjudicating issues of law or fact that remain in dispute. Of these functions, investigating and resolving questions of fact is by far the more important. Sir William Blackstone, the English jurist who wrote in the 1760s, underscored the centrality of fact issues in an arresting passage: [E]xperience will abundantly show, he said, that above a hundred of our lawsuits arise from disputed facts, for one where the law is doubted of.⁹ Was the traffic light red or green? Was the signature forged or genuine? Ascertain the facts in such a dispute, and the law is usually easy—so easy, indeed, that the parties will commonly settle the case, or the court will be able to dismiss it as groundless. Thus, the better a civil procedure system is at investigating and clarifying the facts, the less it will need to take cases to adjudication.

Alas, investigating the facts was for centuries a critical weakness of civil procedure at common law, for reasons connected to the central role of the jury system. Part I of this Article emphasizes that, apart from pleading, the common law provided no means other than trial to probe matters of fact, and that pleading was preoccupied with keeping order among the writs and circumscribing the role of the jury. Common law procedure offered the litigant no means to locate or force production of documentary evidence in the hands of an opponent or a third party, no opportunity other than trial to examine an uncooperative or adverse witness, and no opportunity whatsoever to obtain the sworn testimony of an opposing party. Only in the jury-free equity courts, discussed in Part II, was it possible for a litigant to obtain sworn testimony and documentary evidence in advance of adjudication.

Part III points to the merger of law and equity in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938¹⁰ as the precipitating event in the movement from trial to nontrial procedure in the United States. The Federal Rules and state procedure codes patterned on the Federal Rules govern most civil litigation in the United States.¹¹ The drafters of the Federal Rules had two dominant and connected objectives: to consolidate the previously distinct procedures and courts of common law and equity into a single system,¹² and to redirect pretrial procedure away from pleading and toward discovery. Discovery under the Rules became a system of litigant-conducted investigation, derived from equity procedure, featuring the sworn interrogation of parties and witnesses and compulsory disclosure of documents (and now electronic records). Relatedly, the Federal Rules made liberal provision for summary judgment in cases in which discovery showed that there was no material dispute of fact requiring trial. The discovery regime of the Federal Rules and the associated practices of judicial case management, ostensibly directed at enabling the litigants to prepare for trial, have had the effect of displacing trial in most cases, causing ever more cases to be resolved in the pretrial process, either by settlement or by pretrial adjudication. Pretrial civil procedure has become nontrial civil procedure.

I. COMMON LAW CIVIL TRIAL: ORIGINS AND ATTRIBUTES

A. The Shaping Role of the Jury System

The main features of the Anglo-American¹³ civil trial developed in the practice of the English common law courts¹⁴ in medieval and early modern times, as a consequence of the jury system, in which panels of lay persons were used to decide cases.¹⁵ Legal professionals—judges and lawyers—operated the initial pleading stage of the procedure, which was meant to identify and to narrow the dispute between the parties. If the dispute turned on a matter of law—that is, on a question such as whether the complaint stated a legally actionable claim, or whether some particular legal rule governed—the professional judges decided the case on the pleadings.¹⁶ If, however, the pleadings established that the case turned on a question of fact, the case was sent for resolution at trial by a jury composed of citizens untrained in the law.¹⁷ So tight was the linkage between trial and jury that there was in fact no such thing as nonjury trial at common law.¹⁸ In any case involving a disputed issue of fact, bench trial (adjudication by the judge sitting without a jury) was unknown until the later nineteenth century.¹⁹

In the early days of the jury system, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, jurors were drawn from the close vicinity of the events giving rise to the dispute, in the expectation that the jurors would have knowledge of the events, or if not, that the jurors would be able to investigate the matter on their own in advance of the trial.²⁰ Medieval jurors came to court mostly to speak rather than to listen—not to hear evidence, but to report a verdict that they had agreed upon in advance.²¹ Across the later Middle Ages, the jury ceased to function in this way for complex reasons, including cataclysmic demographic dislocations following the Black Death (the great plague) of the 1340s²² and the effects of urbanization²³ in producing more impersonal social relations. By early modern times, jurors were no longer expected to come to court knowing the facts. The trial changed character and became an instructional proceeding to inform these lay judges about the matter they were being asked to decide.²⁴

This instructional form of trial came to have five distinguishing features, all of which were shaped by the special problems of using jurors, unlearned in the law, as triers of fact.

B. Defining Traits

1. Concentration

In the parlance of comparative law, the Anglo-American trial is said to be concentrated, meaning that it transpires as a single continuous meeting of the court. This proceeding may now adjourn for the evening or the weekend, but it is otherwise uninterrupted. At this continuous proceeding, the court hears all the evidence and all the legal submissions, after which the jurors deliberate and render judgment.

The principle of concentration arose from the challenges of assembling, informing, and controlling a group of twelve lay judges. If you let jurors go home and tell them to return three weeks later, some of them may not show up.²⁵ Moreover, during any such interval, jurors would be at risk of being tampered with—intimidated, bribed, and so forth. It is quite impractical, if not completely impossible, to reconvene a jury of laymen for a number of short hearings held over an extended period of time.²⁶

In jury-free Continental legal systems, based on the Roman-canon tradition,²⁷ civil proceedings are discontinuous, taking place across as many hearings as the court, staffed exclusively with professional judges, thinks necessary. At these hearings the court hears testimony and the submissions of the parties’ lawyers.²⁸ The court records evidence and party submissions in an official file or dossier, which the court will draw upon when writing its judgment if the case does not settle. For efficiency reasons, there has been an effort in modern times in various European systems to encourage the courts to conduct civil proceedings in a single, well-prepared hearing, but this Konzentrationsmaxime²⁹ is at most a managerial aspiration. If the proceedings in a case cannot be so arranged, the case will transpire across as many discontinuous hearings as the circumstances require. In an Anglo-American jury trial, by contrast, the principle of concentration is structural.³⁰

2. The Pretrial/Trial Division

The principle of concentration makes the danger of surprise in an Anglo-American trial acute, because a trial once underway cannot be interrupted and adjourned to a further hearing. In a system of concentrated trial, there is no tomorrow. Contrast Continental procedure: If one party raises an issue of law or fact or offers a significant item of evidence that the opposing party has not anticipated, the surprised party simply motions the court to schedule a further hearing, which will allow time to explore the new matter and, if need be, to identify further responsive evidence.³¹

Because the danger of surprise in Anglo-American procedure has been so consequential, the system has had to institute some sort of procedure in advance of trial to identify and to limit what the trial will be about.³² For most of the history of the common law, this pretrial procedure was largely confined to pleading—that is, the opening phase of litigation in which the litigants were meant to disclose their respective positions. Indeed, pleadings were nearly the only device that common law procedure afforded for the pretrial disclosure of the parties’ claims and evidence.³³

Common law pleading had the further function of controlling the jury, by severely narrowing—to a single issue—the question that the jury would be asked to decide.³⁴

The common law made no provision for the pretrial examination of opposing parties or nonparty witnesses; nor did the common law provide any means³⁵ to compel the production of documents. This inattention to evidence-gathering can be traced back to the foundational period of the common law, in which the self-informing jury was expected to know the facts or to investigate on its own. By treating the jurors as already knowing the facts when they arrived in court, the common law happily dispensed with the need for procedures to investigate fact. In later times, when the trial became an instructional proceeding to educate jurors who no longer had knowledge of the matter in dispute, the pretrial remained confined to pleading. Investigation by means of witness testimony occurred only at trial.³⁶ Moreover, because the parties were disqualified from testifying on account of interest until the middle of the nineteenth century,³⁷ the common law wholly suppressed party testimony.

This impoverishment of the investigative function was perhaps the greatest weakness of common law civil procedure in the age before fusion of law and equity.³⁸ A litigant was powerless to locate or force production of documentary evidence that was in the hands of an opponent or a third party. There was no opportunity to examine an uncooperative or adverse witness in advance of trial,³⁹ and no opportunity ever to examine an opposing party. The maneuver called nonsuit was one response to the shortcomings of the pretrial process at common law in the age before fusion. Lacking pretrial discovery devices, a plaintiff taking a case to trial would sometimes have only a hazy idea of what the evidence might turn out to be. A plaintiff who learned at trial that his evidence was weak could, by moving for nonsuit, withdraw the case before verdict without suffering preclusion.⁴⁰

In American civil procedure before the Federal Rules, trial was often the only real way to do discovery, and some of the trials in this earlier era can be seen as in-court efforts to seek information.⁴¹

3. Bifurcation and Jury Control

The jury system resulted in a division of adjudicative responsibility within the first-instance court, expressed clumsily in the slogan that the judge decides questions of law and the jury decides matters of fact.⁴² This division of function within the common law court, which is without counterpart in the jury-free Continental tradition, is known in comparative law as the principle of bifurcation.⁴³

Bifurcation required a law of jury control, that is, a body of procedural and evidentiary law to regulate the internal relationships between [the] two parts of the trial court.⁴⁴ In the formative era of the common law, the pleading process carried the main work of jury control, by specifying and limiting to a single issue the question to be put to the jury. In later times, as the instructional trial developed to inform the jurors about the facts and the law, the judges were able to devise far-reaching practices of trial-level jury control, including the exclusionary apparatus of the law of evidence, ever more detailed instructions on the law, judicial comment on the merits of the evidence, quashing of verdicts by ordering a new trial, and the directed verdict.⁴⁵ The development of these trial-level controls, by relieving the pleading process of the need to serve the function of jury control, was an important precondition for the redesign of pretrial procedure in the Federal Rules (discussed in Part III of this Article), in which discovery came to be substituted for the disclosure function of pleading.

4. Orality, Immediacy, and Public Access

The connected set of values known as orality, immediacy, and public access was another defining aspect of the Anglo-American trial.⁴⁶ Medieval English jurors were commonly illiterate.⁴⁷ The only way to inform people who cannot read is by talking to them. Jury trial had to be oral. When trial became an instructional proceeding to educate the jurors about the dispute, it took the form of having the parties’ lawyers and the fact witnesses speak to the jurors at the trial.⁴⁸

Jury trials took place in public;⁴⁹ spectators as well as participants could attend, in contrast to the secrecy of evidence gathering both in European civil procedure and in the European-derived procedures of the English equity courts.⁵⁰ The public character of trial was thought to deter false testimony,⁵¹and secrecy would have been impractical to implement in trial courts staffed with dozens of local laymen. Guarantees of openness in trial proceedings are found in many American state constitutions⁵² and are no longer particularly associated with jury proceedings. In modern circumstances, commentators regard these measures as serving monitoring and legitimating functions.⁵³

Contrast the European systems and the English equity courts, in which the practice was for judges or examiners to question witnesses and to summarize their testimony in writing for the court file.⁵⁴ The judge or the court that decided the case based its judgment on reading the file, often not having seen or heard the witnesses. Accordingly, the procedure gave no weight to demeanor evidence, or to confrontation of witness and litigant.⁵⁵ In the German system of Aktenversendung (sending away the court file), it was routine for some distant court (or a university law faculty serving as a court) to render the decision, based on reading the file that had been assembled at the local level.⁵⁶ It is in this sense that the unreformed European procedure is said to have lacked immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit ).⁵⁷

The orality of trial procedure has declined precipitously in modern England, where civil jury trial has been largely suppressed. Since 1985, in a case that goes to trial, witness testimony (evidence in chief) is submitted by affidavit, but the witness may be called for oral cross-examination.⁵⁸

5. Partisan Investigation and Presentation of Fact; Cross-Examination

In striking contrast to the European tradition of judicially conducted fact gathering, the common law judge took no responsibility for investigating the facts of a case. This concept of the judicial role, which distances the judge from investigating the facts, developed in England in medieval times, when the jurors were expected to come to court already knowing the facts. Later, however, when the jurors ceased to be self-informing, and the trial became an instructional proceeding to educate the jurors about the facts, the judges did not materially alter their role. The judges still took no hand in the work of investigating the facts.⁵⁹ That work was left to the litigants, which in practice meant their lawyers.⁶⁰ Both in pretrial investigation⁶¹and at trial, the lawyers came to dominate the process of gathering, selecting, and presenting evidence about the facts.⁶² As the instructional trial developed, the lawyers took charge of examining and cross-examining witnesses and presenting any documentary evidence, as well as addressing the jurors.⁶³

The practice of lawyer-conducted cross-examination of witnesses, which is unknown to systems of trial other than the common-law system,⁶⁴ took hold in early modern times.⁶⁵ By the nineteenth century, cross-examination had come to be seen as the central safeguard in the common law trial. An American commentator writing in 1857 called cross-examination the most perfect and effectual system for the unraveling of falsehood ever devised by the ingenuity of mortals.⁶⁶ This reliance upon cross-examination as the guarantor of truth is puzzling, because contemporaries knew that cross-examination could also be put to truth-defeating ends.⁶⁷

The movement to nontrial civil procedure in the later twentieth century has necessarily entailed an abandonment of cross-examination, although (as remarked below in connection with discovery practice under the Federal Rules) the pretrial deposition serves a somewhat comparable function, allowing counsel to probe the projected testimony of adverse witnesses.

II. EQUITY: NONTRIAL AND NONJURY CIVIL PROCEDURE

Jury procedure made it awkward for common law courts to administer specific remedies, such as the injunction (cease this) or the decree of specific performance (do that).⁶⁸ Specific relief often requires continuing supervision and modification as circumstances change,⁶⁹ but a jury dissolves once it has delivered its verdict. Accordingly, the early common law courts largely confined themselves to awarding money damages⁷⁰ except in cases involving ownership or possession of real property.⁷¹ But no society can long tolerate a legal system that lacks the power to grant specific remedies.

The English solved this dilemma in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by creating a second system of civil justice, which came to be called equity, and which was administered primarily⁷² in a new court, the Court of Chancery, which employed nonjury procedures. The judge, called the chancellor, exercised the power to order specific relief,⁷³ based upon his power to imprison a person who disobeyed his decree.⁷⁴ The